Kaveri 2.0 mobile platform detailed

Richland has been out for a while and some top manufacturers including HP, Lenovo, Acer and Asus have a few notebooks wrapped around this APU. The replacement, codenamed Kaveri, is coming in January 2014 and it brings some performance improvements.

The most important ones are that the new SteamrollerB core delivers up to 20 more CPU performance than Richland. Kaveri comes in dual and quad-core flavours and with a maximum of 4MB of L2 cache. It also features temperature smart Turbo Core that can down clock when you don’t need a lot of power. The new power optimized Graphics Core Next based GPU offers up to 30 percent faster performance compared with its predecessor. AMD also has a new feature that we saw with Hawaii series desktop parts. It is an ACP Audio Coprocessor that should give you better sound and potentially save some battery, UVD 3.0 is there as well as SAMU 2.1 Secure Assent management unit.

New display features include PCIe Gen 3 x16 slot for discrete graphics expansion as well as new dedicated PCIe SSD interface among the "standard" 4K resolution output support. AMD has new Start Now 3.0 with smart sleep power management and the TDP of the SKUs ranges between 15W (ultra low power dual-cores) and 35W for quad-cores. AMD promises up to 11 hours of battery life with a 62WHr battery and 14-inch display 1366x768 eDP panel, or 8.5 hours with a 45WHr battery.

This is not bad but in real life use we don’t think we will get these numbers. Also most mainstream notebooks and purchasers want at 1920x1080 display, or at least something higher than 1366x768 display. Kaveri 2.0 is certainly a nice evolutionary step that comes after Richland and it is AMD’s first 28nm performance CPU.